From its new location, the

Scottish Review may be

tempted to fly away

Bill Jamieson

With each week that passes the sky grows darker. It's not just the weather. It's the business mood, the shop closures, the economy, even the football. How subconsciously pleasing it must be for the staff of the Scottish Review to relocate to new offices at Prestwick Airport. To the east – darkness; to the west, those gorgeous sunsets, the runway – and planes taking off to freedom.
     My childhood memories of Prestwick are fond. I had an aunt who was an air hostess based at Prestwick, always impeccably dressed and ever youthful. The routine of long haul flights to North America must have been gruelling. She would tell of freezing days and nights in Toronto, of weather that made me shiver just to listen to her. But there was no job she would rather do. It was her escape. She was ever smiling and always looked radiant with her BOAC hat and shoulder bag.
     These were in the days when even the passengers made an effort to look smart. All long gone now. As if the exasperating airport security was not enough, you can safely rely, despite all those admonitions about minimum hand luggage, on being stuck behind a party of backpacker Koreans with giant rucksacks in your face and their billy cans dangling in front of your nose.
     Last week I had the mixed pleasure of being summoned as a witness before an informal meeting of the Scottish Parliament's economy, enterprise and tourism committee. The proceedings were off the record and while there was little of news value to report I do not mean to break the omerta. But I do not think the following observations would break the rules.
     I could barely recognise any of the faces. And strange though it may seem coming from a right of centre journalist, I found the proceedings tame without the forensic grilling of Wendy Alexander and David Whitton. They always impressed me. Wendy has left not so much a mark as a gaping hole.

 

     However, insightful though these two were, the interventions I really feared were those from Christopher Harvie, best known as the SNP MSP for Düsseldorf West. 'Curved ball' did not begin to describe his questions. You never knew what would pop into his head or indeed, the point he was making even after he had made it at great length. But there was one constant with Mr Harvie. There was no issue whatever beyond the reach of a bizarre verbal detour on how things were done in Düsseldorf. He has left an air of mystery behind him, like a character that has tumbled out the pages of a Gunther Grass novel.
     My one reservation about politicians – not just ex-ones – is how poorly informed many are about business and business conditions. Most do not begin to grasp the dark implication of events of recent months, the plunge in almost all indicators of business activity and confidence. Attempts to appraise them of what's coming usually result in a charge of being anti Scottish. So I wrote an upbeat column last week listing those companies in Scotland that had been doing reasonably well till now.
     Newspapers do such articles at great risk. They are almost always followed by a catastrophic downward lunge in the economy. Two recessions ago a paper for which I once worked ran an upbeat series entitled 'Slimmer and Leaner'. We were sent out to talk up companies taking bold action to survive. Several months later they fell, one by one, into the clutches of the receivers. It was like the Private Eye Curse of Gnome.
     So how would I fare, working in an office overlooking the runway at Prestwick Airport? Looking at the dark clouds to the east, the relentless build-up of depression and foreboding, watching the planes taking off and flying westward would become an obsession.
     And it would be hard to resist the temptation. One short walk, one bulging rucksack and a dangling billy can at the back, and I'd be off. What's the point of Prestwick without flying out?

 

Bill Jamieson is executive editor of The Scotsman. He is writing here in a personal capacity